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The Last Message Sent on AIM

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Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#131

Post by sombremesa »

tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

Reminds me of the time I read about someone inheriting six figures worth of Apple shares from their grandparents (who had an excellent cost basis, of course) and immediately selling it all to 'diversify'.

It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#132

Post by icedchai »

a-dub wrote: post #48
ThePhysicist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the…

I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and au…

Too bad they didn't open source it. I'm sure most of the costs were in the employees required to operate and maintain the system. I am skeptical the infrastructure itself was that expensive, unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware. 90's tech is generally pretty light weight...

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#133

Post by raldi »

sombremesa wrote: post #131
tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

Reminds me of the time I read about someone inheriting six figures worth of Apple shares from their grandparents (who had an excellent cost basis, of course) and immediately selling it all to 'diversify'. It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.

Wouldn’t this be equivalent to someone who inherited six figures in cash and failed to immediately use all of it to purchase Apple shares?

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#134

Post by tinco »

raldi wrote: post #133
sombremesa wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the time I read about someone inheriting six figures worth of Apple shares from their grandparents (who had an excellent cost basis, of course) and immediately selling it all to 'diversify'. It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.

Wouldn’t this be equivalent to someone who inherited six figures in cash and failed to immediately use all of it to purchase Apple shares?

This is the opposite, the big companies closed their messaging platforms because they wanted to shed low performing departments and consolidate, instead of maintaining them and keep attempting to make them florish which would be a form of diversification.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#137

Post by werber »

I remember my use of AIM fading through college. It being used through the message app on Mac made the experience of it going away pretty seemless. I use my text messages through essentially the same application, so in a way it still feels current

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#138

Post by ballenf »

roywiggins wrote: post #128
addicted wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously. The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to…

My grandmother mourns Picasa and PicasaWeb to this day .

My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music to Google Play. It was the single largest source of loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's missing back button being second.

And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail, many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now. And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They basically said something like "I'm going to stop working soon. You should do something about that."

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#139

Post by rglover »

This just reminded me of my first online girlfriend I met on AIM. I think I was 12-13 and I socially engineered an AT&T operator into letting me bill long-distance call charges directly to my parent's house by pretending to be a traveling salesman.

It was an enlightening moment about the fragility of human-fronted systems. $1,200 later and a disconnected phone line...let's just say they weren't thrilled.

I also got my parent's AOL account suspended in 1995 when I decided to repeat this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=115&v=Erl-Uk8-Xr4&feature=yo...) in the AOL kids chat.

I really, really miss the early internet.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#140

Post by ballenf »

a-dub wrote: post #48
ThePhysicist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the…

I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and au…

> stepping into unethical privacy breach territory

Given oath's laughable privacy policy, I'm not sure any stepping would be required.

Granted the shutdown came before the Verizon/Oath takeover, but somehow I doubt the decision came down to "we could make a lot of money off this, but it will require relaxation of privacy practices, so we'll just shut it down instead."

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